Blockchain-Based Secure IoT Communication for Smart Manufacturing
Abstract
The Increasing pace of smart manufacturing enabled by Industrial IoT (IIoT) has enabled real-time monitoring of devices, predictive maintenance, and autonomous decision-making of individual production lines, but the sheer scale of interconnection of devices poses factories with the very real threat of data manipulation, unauthorised access, and cyber-physical attack. The poor fit between industrial communication volume, high latency, and heterogeneity of current centralised security models can often create bottlenecks, focus points, and insufficient resilience to insider threats. This study aims to address these problems by presenting a Blockchain-Integrated Lightweight Security Framework (BLSF) for use in secure IoT communication within smart manufacturing. The framework combines a Directed Acyclic Graph (DAG)-based blockchain architecture with a two-consensus framework based on Proof of Authentication (PoA) to support lightweight and low-latency device-to-device communication on the edge and Proof of Integrity (PoI) to support tamper-resistant recording of production-critical information in the distributed ledger. Furthermore, a mobile model that utilises trust scores continues to test the activities of each device to identify outliers and isolate infected nodes, thereby improving the system’s resistance to both insider and outsider attacks. The output of simulation-based results in a digital-twin manufacturing setting shows that BLSF outperforms traditional blockchain and centralised security methods by a large margin. The throughput is 42% higher, and the accuracy of anomaly detection is more than 90% better than conventional blockchain and centralised security strategies. Because the proposed solution integrates decentralisation, transparency, and adaptive trust within the IoT communication, it enables the offered solution to deliver resilient, efficient, and tamper-resistant manufacturing processes, which ultimately opens the door to secure and autonomous Industry 4.0 and provides a sound platform to Industry 5.0 ecosystems, where human-machine cooperation necessitates undamaged trust and reliability.